Douhet, Giulio
Douhet, Giulio
General Giulio Douhet, Italian military theorist, was born in Caserta in 1869 and died in Rome in 1930. While he was a young career officer he studied the application of physics—especially electricity and low-temperature physics—to military problems. He wrote essays on these subjects, on the problems arising from the motorization of the army, and on the tactical lessons to be drawn from the Russo-Japanese War.
From 1908 on, he devoted himself, as a student of strategy, to the study of the military implications of developments in aeronautics. As an active officer in the Italian army, he hoped to make his influence felt in the arming of the Italian forces, and after his appointment as commanding officer of the air battalion in Turin, it seemed that Douhet might have an opportunity to put his ideas into practice. He was convinced by his studies and by his experience in the Italo-Turkish War of 1911–1912 that the airplane was far superior to the dirigible as an offensive weapon. This idea was reinforced by his work with Gianni Caproni, the aeronautical engineer who designed and built the first biplane.
Douhet’s vigorously expressed views led to disagreement with the military establishment and with the Italian general staff. He was removed from his command and received an assignment unrelated to his professional specialization. He was even subjected to two official investigations, which concluded quite favorably for him, but he was so embittered that he thought of resigning from active service. He retracted this decision only because of the outbreak of World War i.
During the war he frequently criticized the Italian high command and the Allied direction of the war. His dissent was mainly centered upon the value of offensive actions, and he continued to advocate use of the airplane. The nucleus of his criticism (which he put in writing at the time, but which was not, of course, printed until after the war) was that the strategy of the Western Allies was basically wrong because it insisted on partial offensives, which are exceedingly costly in men and weapons and cannot produce a strategic success. He maintained that in land warfare the defensive side is in a far stronger position than the attacking side because of the progress in defensive weapons and ground defense systems. Thus, the Allied powers should conduct the war defensively, with a minimal consumption of men, and should launch an offensive only after having built up the overwhelming armed strength that their superior industrial capacity permitted them. This offensive action should be carried out by airplanes, and Douhet insisted again and again that a powerful fleet of bombers be built and used autonomously. This air force should have as its targets not the enemy forces but the supply centers and the lines of communication in order to paralyze the enemy military system.
On the demand of a member of the Italian Cabinet he summarized his criticism of the Italian high command in a memorandum. The document was discovered by the military authorities, and Douhet was court-martialed and condemned to a year of confinement. After he served the sentence, the new Italian commander in chief, General Armando Diaz, appointed him director of aeronautics in the defense ministry. In this capacity he was, toward the end of the war, again able to devote himself to his chosen field of action. After his full rehabilitation, which did not take place until 1920, Douhet tried to find employment again, even in a subordinate capacity, in the air force. He was unsuccessful and felt doomed to uselessness.
Douhet’s theories, although to a degree based on his experiences in World War i, had already been outlined in some of his prewar writings (e.g., 1910). In these articles Douhet insisted on the autonomous role of the air force, then considered as a mere auxiliary of the army and the navy.
The main argument of Douhet’s theory is that the offensive power of an air fleet of bombers is the most formidable instrument of war a country can have; that against such a force fighters are ineffectual, so that it is preferable to build bombers, which also have fighting capability; and that the very first aim of a fleet of bombers is to destroy the enemy air force on the ground in order to achieve air supremacy. Once this has been achieved, a country has to make every effort to strike the severest possible blow against the enemy and to inflict upon him the greatest possible damage. Road junctions, supply and production centers, indeed the cities of the enemy, should be the targets, so that the people will be panic-stricken and ask for an end to the war. Therefore it is more important to inflict destruction on the enemy than to try to avoid devastation of one’s own territory.
Douhet’s thinking was original and bore no relationship to any previous strategic conception. Indeed, it very often contradicted well-established doctrines; this fact and the zeal of Douhet—a man of great intellectual and moral probity—repeatedly led him into trouble.
Douhet made a major contribution to the theory of air warfare. In the United States, his ideas undoubtedly influenced General “Billy” Mitchell. It has been remarked that during World War ii, the very war envisaged in one of Douhet’s works, “The War of 19—” (1930), some of his assumptions were proved wrong. Bombers had no decisive effect, fighters proved to be a very effective war instrument, especially in the Battle of Britain, and land forces were able to penetrate deeply into the enemy’s territory and possessed a very real offensive capability. This criticism is certainly justified as far as World War ii is concerned. In particular, it has been correctly observed that Douhet exaggerated the power of conventional explosives. On the other hand, there is no doubt that many of his ideas seem to be more applicable to our nuclear age: one may detect a first outline, in his theories, of the counter-force and counter-city strategy. It may be of some interest to add that, in a passage in his main work, The Command of the Air (1921), Douhet envisaged the possibility that such a formidable instrument of war as an air force might serve an international authority in enforcing the observance of existing treaties.
Fausto Bacchetti
[For the historical context of Douhet’s work, seeStrategy; War; and the biographies ofClausewitz; Mahan.]
WORKS BY DOUHET
1910 La possibilità dell’aereonavigazione. Rivista delle communicazioni [1910]: 1303–1319.
(1921) 1942 The Command of the Air. New York: Coward McCann. ? First published as II dominio dell’aria.
1921–1922 Diario critico di guerra. 2 vols. Turin (Italy): Paravia.
(1930) 1942 The War of 19—. Pages 293–394 in Giulio Douhet, The Command of the Air. New York: Coward McCann. ? First published in the Rivista aeronautica as “La guerra aerea del 19—.”
1951 Scritti inediti. Edited by Antonio Monti. Florence (Italy): Scuola di Guerro Aerea. ? Published posthumously.
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brodie, Bernard 1959 The Heritage of Douhet. Pages 71–106 in Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age. Princeton Univ. Press.
Earle, Edward M. 1943Douhet, Mitchell, Seversky: Theories of Air Warfare. Pages 485–503 in Edward M. Earle, Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought From Machiavelli to Hitler. Princeton Univ. Press.
Sigaud, Louis A. 1941 Douhet and Aerial Warfare. New York: Putnam.
Vauthier, ArsÈne Marie Paul 1935 La doctrine de guerre du Général Douhet. Paris: Berger-Levrault.